Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who had led the North Vietnamese military during the Vietnam War, was looking for the woman who had shot down an American bomber in June 1968. In the nearly four decades that had passed, she had worked many jobs and raised three children. Few people outside her family had heard her wartime stories.

Heroines and striking female figures are not new in Vietnam — they have played an integral role in Vietnamese history for millenniums. In the 1st century A.D., the Trung sisters, often called Vietnam’s earliest national patriots, led a three-year rebellion against the Chinese Han dynasty, which ruled their country. The female legacy persists in the modern era; in all of Vietnam’s recent conflicts, women have been crucial. They fought alongside men and carried heavy loads down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Yet as the historian Karen G. Turner notes in her book “Even the Women Must Fight,” “Women warriors, so essential to Vietnam’s long history and so important in the most photographed war in history, have remained invisible.”

Thanks to a generous anonymous grant, Marilyn B. Young was able to attend Harvard University on full scholarship, provided she learned Chinese and wrote a thesis in the field of US-East Asian relations. This, in due course she did, under the direction of Ernest R. May and John King Fairbank, who nicely book-ended the subject matter. The thesis, and subsequent book, Rhetoric of Empire, put 19th century American policy towards China in an international context, examining the Notes as the emerged out of the crisis of the Boxer Rebellion. Her subsequent scholarship has had a dual track: to understand both American imperialism and those who fought against it, at home and abroad.

Christy Thornton & Stuart Schrader, « Marilyn Young (1937–2017)« , Jacobin Mag, 24/02/2017. Militarism runs deep in the United States, but historian Marilyn Young never gave up believing that it could be overcome.

Abstract

Relatively little has been written about the military women who served in Vietnam, and there is virtually no literature on deployed civilian women (non-military). We examined the experiences of 1285 American women, military and civilian, who served in Vietnam during the war and responded to a mail survey conducted approximately 25 years later in which they were asked to report and reflect upon their experiences and social and health histories.

We compare civilian women, primarily American Red Cross workers, to military women stratified by length of service, describe their demographic characteristics and warzone experiences (including working conditions, exposure to casualties and sexual harassment), and their homecoming following Vietnam. We assess current health and well-being and also compare the sample to age- and temporally-comparable women in the General Social Survey (GSS), with which our survey shared some measures.

Short-term (<10 years) military service women (28%) were more likely to report their Vietnam experience as “highly stressful” than were career (>20 years; 12%) and civilian women (13%). Additional differences regarding warzone experiences, homecoming support, and health outcomes were found among groups. All military and civilian women who served in Vietnam were less likely to have married or have had children than women from the general population, χ2 (8) = 643.72, p < .001. Career military women were happier than women in the general population (48% were “very happy”, as compared to 38%). Civilian women who served in Vietnam reported better health than women in the other groups. Regression analyses indicated that long-term physical health was mainly influenced by demographic characteristics, and that mental health and PTSD symptoms were influenced by warzone and homecoming experiences. Overall, this paper provides insight into the experiences of the understudied women who served in Vietnam, and sheds light on subgroup differences within the sample.